Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer related deaths in women across the world. Early detection of breast cancer plays an important role in reducing the cancer related deaths. Recently, the use of ultrasound imaging as a breast cancer screening tool has increased considerably, especially in developing countries. In addition to being relatively inexpensive and safe, using ultrasound images as an adjunct screening tool may provide improved detection sensitivity, especially for young women with relatively dense breast tissue.
But, known methods for detecting lesions in ultrasound images of the breast are not without disadvantages. For example, scanning the patient with the ultrasound probe is highly operator dependent, which may result in inconsistent and/or inaccurate ultrasound scans. Moreover, the relatively low quality of ultrasound images and the addition of artifacts such as speckle noise, shadows, ringing, and/or the like may increase the difficulty of lesion detection within ultrasound images. Known methods for detecting lesions in ultrasound images of the breast may also do a relatively poor job of accounting for the significant variations in the shape, size, echogenicity, and margin characteristics of breast lesions.